The Paul Wells Show - A crisis of confidence in Canadian universities
Episode Date: March 5, 2025Paul breaks down some of the major challenges facing higher education in Canada, including a lack of political will to invest in the sector.  He is then joined by a panel of insiders for their tak...es on what to do about it. How are they handling this moment? What does the future look like? And how can universities make the case for their relevance in a changing world?  The panelists are: Graham Carr, President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia University Maud Cohen, President of Polytechnique Montréal Christopher Manfredi, Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic) at McGill University Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
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The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy,
where I'm a senior fellow.
I am happy to be speaking tonight in my capacity as a Max Bell Foundation Fellow at McGill University.
This is the first of several talks I'll be giving in different cities on topics in public policy.
But what I told the Foundation when they asked me to do this is that I work best when I'm starting
conversations, not dominating them. So at each of these events my remarks are only the prologue to
a fuller conversation among experts in the field. Tonight those guests are Christopher Manfredi, the Provost and Executive Vice President
Academic here at McGill, Maude Cohen, President of the Ecole Polytechnique, and Graham Carr,
the President and Vice Chancellor of Concordia University. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show.
So I am pleased to be at a great university talking about universities. But I come from
news so I'm often preoccupied with whatever just happened. And I come from Ottawa so I'm
especially preoccupied
if it's something that happened in politics.
So let me begin with some thoughts
on the economic policy that was published on Monday
by the man who's been shaking up federal politics, Mark Carney.
Mr. Carney was the governor of central banks
in two countries, Canada and the UK,
something nobody else has ever done.
He's running to be prime minister. It's been going well. And he's running as the smart guy,
bringing a level of seriousness that's been hard to find in Ottawa.
This policy document that he released on Monday is designed to deepen that brand advantage.
Carney writes, quote, the core mission of my government would be to grow the strongest economy in the G7. That means growth that improves the quality of life of all Canadians,
increases the real wages of all Canadians, supports and improves our social model,
finances our rising security needs, and provides Canadians with a deserved sense
of optimism and confidence that our future will be much better than our past. And while he's doing all that,
he promises to support young people in fulfilling their potential. How? By
cutting taxes for the middle class and providing additional boosts to the
incomes of younger Canadians so they can build a prosperous
future. Now I've got some specific concerns with Carney's plan that I might yet get around to
writing about, but it's fair to say that a strong economy, rising wages and confidence in the future
are exactly what people want a political leader to talk about. Mark Carney will probably win the
Liberal leadership next month and the prospect of his arrival
is making liberals competitive again in the polls as they face Pierre Pauli's conservatives
in an election that will probably happen soon.
So good for him.
But what was striking to me as I read this platform, knowing that I would be speaking
to you tonight, is that the word university does not appear anywhere in the document.
The word college does not appear.
The word research does not appear.
The words education and innovation do appear one time each.
Each time it's in conjunction with an ambitious project that excites Mr. Carney so much he
doesn't really pause to explain it.
He wants to leverage AI and deploy AI and harness AI and lead the world in AI.
Now sure, leveraging and deploying all of this artificial intelligence will probably
also require the deployment somewhere along the line of some intelligence.
And at no point in Carney's brief manifesto does he express active antagonism toward higher
education.
I suspect he'd be surprised to learn that his own economic plan uses the word catalyze
four times and the word university not at all.
He'd probably protest that higher education is implied, or that it goes without saying,
or that he'll mention it tomorrow. After all, this is a man who spent 11 years at two of the
world's most revered universities, Harvard and Oxford, and whose career since then would be
unimaginable if he hadn't. But trade isn't implied in the platform document, he mentions it nine times.
NORAD isn't assumed in his plans for the future, or the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or manufacturing,
or Indigenous Reconciliation, or North Korea.
He uses his words to talk about all of that stuff.
And incidentally, if by now you think I'm picking on Mark Carney, I should point out
that another leading candidate
for the party's leadership, Krista Freeland, has been more detailed in her own policy proposals
than Carney has.
When you're number two, you have to try harder.
But I can't find a single reference to universities in any of her stuff either, nor any mention
of research.
She does want to help young Canadians build our sustainable future.
She'll do that by making trade schools free.
This is all starting to get a bit odd.
Just like her colleague Mark Carney, Freeland went to Harvard and Oxford.
Unlike him, she's been a cabinet minister in a government formed by a party that was elected and re-elected.
She's had to make governing decisions. In that capacity, as Canada's finance minister
less than a year ago, she said in her 2024 budget speech, a prosperous future and abundant good
paying jobs depend on Canada's innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers. That is why
we are supporting them. That budget provided $5 billion for AI
Compute and increases to the budgets of the research grounding councils which pay for a lot
of Canada's university research. These investments were belated because Justin Trudeau's Liberal
government has been only sporadically interested in higher education and research, but at least
the money was there. The new spending followed recommendations by
Frédéric Bouchard, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal, in a report he wrote
for the federal government. But when I say the budget provided five billion dollars for university
research, what I mean is that the budget said some government really should spend five billion
dollars on university research over several years. In the 2024 budget year, only 13 percent of that money actually got
spent. The other 87 percent is hanging out there in the future. Decisions on whether to spend it
will of course be made by future governments. So it may be a problem that the two most prominent
candidates to run one of those governments have forgotten that Canada has universities.
And of course, there's no guarantee that a liberal will be prime minister in a year.
Pierre Poliev, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada,
and still the likeliest winner of the next election, has been talking about universities.
Two months ago, he told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that he
will defund all of those with a woke anti-semitic agenda, including at
universities who receive federal funding, as well as all federally funded museums.
He said he'll defund all those who are imposing a radical, terrifying, toxic
ideology, and this will apply to everything that the federal government
controls.
So if you want a leader who's been talking about universities, there you go.
I'm making a broader point here. The public statements of politicians
have a relationship to public opinion. Sometimes politicians are a leading indicator,
rushing boldly ahead of conventional wisdom on an issue. Sometimes they're a lagging indicator trying their best to catch up. And sometimes they simply keep their
distance. This is one of those times. I've never seen universities more absent from our politics.
For those of us who believe universities and higher education more generally
can be ingredients in a country's prosperity and success. There's nothing benign in that neglect.
This becomes clearer when we look at what's been going on in several
provinces. For much of what follows, I'm indebted to Alex Usher at Higher
Education Strategy Associates, who reads every party's election platform before
every provincial election to see what's been being proposed on higher education.
Because there have been many elections lately, Alex has been busy lately.
Ontario is electing a provincial government today. Alex called the Ontario
Liberals' higher education proposals, quote, objectively the worst liberal
platform commitment on post-secondary education anywhere in Canada in my lifetime just awful. Of Premier Doug Ford and his
progressive conservatives, Alex writes that quote Ontario has never been a
leader in funding or regulating post-secondary education but the Ford
government has taken things to new depths sometimes by ignorance or sins of
omission but more often
through acts of deliberate vandalism, like a tuition freeze, a deliberate supercharging
of international student enrollments at colleges, and of course an utter failure
to deal with the fallout when the federal government called a halt to things. They are a disaster.
Great thing about Alex is you can never tell who you would rather you vote for.
To its credit, Ford's government has recently announced the creation of new medical schools
at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University.
But the cost pressure facing every university in the province won't spare those two just because they're now running ambitious new programs.
It's the same story in other provinces. The NDP
in Saskatchewan and the Conservative Party of BC have little in common,
but their platforms last year had no university-related promises at all.
Parties that did mention higher education in their platforms were often focused on
reducing the cost to students. This is a telling choice.
Deciding whether to attend university entails a cost-benefit analysis.
Lately, political parties would rather compress the cost than increase the benefit.
This is new in my experience.
Governments that were excited about the future used to want to get closer to universities,
because universities represented
youth and discovery. On the first full day of the 2000 federal election campaign,
I was amazed to follow Jean Chrétien into the Computed Rotational Angiography Lab
at the John P. Robards Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, my alma mater.
His opponent was a younger man, Stockwell Day, who led the short-lived
Canadian Alliance party.
Kretchen's goal was to show that at any age, he still understood the future better.
So he spent a lot of time in rooms full of lab coats.
After that 2000 campaign, Kretchen's majority in parliament was bigger than before.
For years afterward, thinking about the future meant thinking
about universities. Here's my favorite example. In 2007, the British Columbia
government under Premier Gordon Campbell published a report written by a former
provincial attorney general called Campus 2020. Its top-level goal was to
make British Columbia the best educated jurisdiction in North America by 2020, only 13 years hence at that time.
Along the way, BC was supposed to achieve the highest level of participation in post-secondary
education in the country, and Indigenous rates of post-secondary attainment would match the
rates in the general population.
Reaching these targets, the report said, will require leadership, planning, commitment, focus, resources, and innovation.
In the end, BC ended up not reaching those targets.
Fortunately, not reaching those targets required less leadership, less planning, less commitment, and less focus.
So that was easier. But just because the discourse on universities changed, I don't believe or want to be seen
claiming that the politicians of the early 2000s were brave visionaries and the politicians
of the 2010s were functionaries bereft of vision.
Politicians almost always do their best.
I just think the context has changed in important ways.
Let me list a few.
First, the longer any budget line grows, the harder it becomes to sustain that growth.
And the more tempting it becomes to ease up.
It's the law of geometric progression, and it applies to higher education in Canada as
it does to anything.
Higher education in Canada grew very fast for many years. The country
had 22,000 university undergraduates in 1920 and four times as many in 1948, the peak of
post-war free tuition for veterans. But because going to university wasn't the only thing
that veterans did after the war, Canada soon had a baby boom to manage.
So university enrollment quadrupled again by 1966.
By then it wasn't just the scale of higher education that was changing, but its nature.
Community and technical colleges were added to the system.
Universities became centers of research as well as scholarship.
That's more expensive.
So not only did enrollment triple
from 1960 to 1974, spending per student nearly doubled at the same time.
The oil crisis of 1974 brought a durable end to the spree for nearly 20 years. By the time
Canada got its fiscal house in order, Jean Chrétien was prime minister, his brother
was a medical researcher,
and rapid increases in federal funding for university research became something the sector thought it could count on once again. But the numbers involved by this point were large.
Any government faces competing claims for that kind of money, infrastructure, national defense,
family benefits. And thanks to something else that happened while Kretchen was prime minister,
the sponsorship scandal that led to the liberals
losing power for a decade,
governments had become far more concerned
about being able to account later
for every dollar that they spent.
One of the most wonderful things about research
is that it's inherently mysterious.
Sometimes a line of investigation doesn't pan out.
Sometimes an experiment kills a beautiful hypothesis.
Sometimes it leads to discoveries with implications very far from the original hypothesis,
with applications very far from the original field of study.
You can't really predict the outcome of research. Really the only way to know how it's going to work out is to do the research. Jeffrey Hinton's work on AI
was considered a terrible bet for many years before it started to pay off big. Tony Pauzen's work on
signal transduction in cells began with a question about an odd virus that occurs naturally in
chickens. For decades in three different countries, he managed to get funding for this research, but at the beginning nobody was excited about it.
They were more excited later when Pau's discoveries led to a global industry in protein kinase inhibitors,
a class of drugs that are today worth tens of billions of dollars.
You just never know what you're going to get.
Increasingly, governments hate that.
They don't know how to explain it to their
bosses, whether they're superiors in a minister's office or to the people who elect them.
Accountability isn't the only obstacle to unfettered research. So is the growing obsession
in large organizations with a certain idea of effective communications. I've written
a lot about this. When smartphones and social media became
ubiquitous after 2008, the amount of random content our civilization pushes out increased
exponentially. Five exabytes, or five billion billion bytes of data, could store all the words
ever spoken by humans between the birth of the world and 2003,
the Harvard Business School economist Bharat Anand has written.
In 2011, five exabytes of content were created every two days.
This meant that anyone in the communications business was now shutting into a hurricane.
Anand writes, it's a strategic and marketing nightmare even to make consumers aware
of what you're producing. He calls this the problem of getting noticed. The response to this cacophony
was the rise of message discipline as a paramount virtue for large organizations. If you have
anything to say in that horrible mess out there, say what you're doing. Say it in a simple, catchy way.
Repeat it endlessly because it will take forever
for your message to cut through.
Don't say anything else because it'll
just confuse your message.
And above all, don't listen.
Don't let new information distract you because
you might change your message to reflect this
new information and that will just confuse your message too.
So the worst thing that can happen change your message to reflect this new information, and that will just confuse your message too. So the worst thing that can happen to your message
is you paying any attention to anyone else's message.
This isn't a hobby for people in public life.
It's an overriding strategic imperative.
It explains a lot of politicians' weird behavior these days.
If you can't sell your story, you have no story,
which means you can't be heard and you can't win.
If you're in a government, your message is always going to be
an essentially heroic story about how you fixed a big problem
and made everything better.
I built more homes.
I made life affordable.
I brought Canada back.
This heroic vision is easier to sell
if the politician can claim a direct link between
action and outcome.
I leveraged AI is a good heroic story.
A man stands up.
He has a lever.
There's AI.
Here's a much harder heroic story to sell.
I gave scientists some of your money.
They decided among
themselves how it would be spent. We're pretty sure it will all work out. Next
year I'll give them more. So for all these reasons it's much harder to get
increases in funding than it used to be. But universities and especially
community colleges in Canada have understood for many years that government's willingness to support their research mission was flagging,
which is why so many higher education institutions spent the last decade turning like sunflowers away from research dollars as a way of paying the bills and toward international students.
We know how that turned out.
For a while, governments and higher education institutions worked together to bring in international
students at an unprecedented rate, especially in Ontario and especially in some of that
province's community colleges.
Then it all came crashing down.
Ballooning student populations put too much pressure on housing stock, and a year ago, Marc Miller, the Immigration Minister, announced a two-year cap on international
student permits. In itself, that represents a substantial cut in total funding for higher
education. But some provinces have gone further. Yesterday, Quebec's government announced it will
accept 20% fewer international students next year than it did last year.
People who've been trying to run institutions of higher education must feel like they've
been getting a runaround.
Shortly, I'll be joined for a panel discussion by distinguished administrators from McGill,
Concordia, and the École Pellet Technique.
But here's a quick version of what those places have been through.
In 2012, after province-wide protests, governments in Quebec abandoned tuition increases for
university students from Quebec. So whoever was going to pay for Quebec's universities,
it mostly wouldn't be the sons and daughters of Quebec families. At the time, it was reasonable
to assume governments would pay more,
and more, for universities out of general revenues, and that an activist federal government
would keep increasing its research budget. And that Canadian students from outside Quebec
would pay more. And that students from other countries would pay more.
But governments got tired of putting ever higher amounts toward higher education.
Research funding fell out of fashion.
Last year, the Legault government decided
there were too many students from outside Quebec,
so it made it harder and more expensive
for them to come here.
International students were all that was left
as a significant source of higher income for the system.
Now there
will be fewer of them, too. So far, I've mostly been talking about universities as a function of
costs and revenues. Of course, that's a terribly arid way to talk. It shortchanges the remarkable
contributions of Canada's finest academics and the students they attract and inspire.
But it also neglects a less lovely aspect of university life in recent years,
which is the cultural debate that they provoke.
If you talk to parents of university-aged children, these days you are likely to hear
them talk about four undergraduate years as a questionable indulgence. More and more parents,
I know, are resigned to the idea that the student and the family will need some vocational
training after university to teach them something useful, and increasingly as a kind of detox.
Campuses have been the centre of some extraordinarily acrimonious debates in recent years.
I don't know a lot of people who think those debates have helped much.
I don't know a lot of people who want to bring those debates into their workplaces.
When he was a candidate for the Liberal leadership 12 years ago, Justin Trudeau talked about
public and private investment in science and the innovation and productivity growth that
it spurs.
I think fewer people are convinced these days that investment in higher education is synonymous
with investment in science.
And I think that in particular, people doubt that we're getting a lot of innovation from
our universities or anything likely to increase productivity, which is how we get a front-running candidate
for the highest political job in the country talking about artificial intelligence as though
we're the product of a virgin birth.
Sure, harness and deploy and leverage AI, but don't talk about where it comes from
and don't try to have more of that stuff happening.
It's just too fraught.
I have in the last couple of years become a bit of a hanging judge on the social role of Canadian higher education.
I'm the guy who shows up and reigns on the parade.
All I can say is that it goes against instinct.
I will never forget the wonderful days that I spent in university.
I'm always happy to be back on a campus.
And I strongly believe that there is no problem that Canada faces
that will get better if we deprive the debate around that problem of intelligence and research
and imagination. And the other thing I can say is that the people we're about to hear from know
more about all of this than I do and that Canada already benefits from their optimism and their
industry. But the first step is to admit you have a problem. With that step taken care of, I'd like to invite our panelists
up on here.
It's a great honor to be joined by Christopher Manfredi from McGill, Maud Cohen from the Ecole Polytechnique, Graham Carr from Concordia University.
Chris, what's your read on the role of higher education in Canadian society these days?
Well, let me start, I think, with your last comment, Paul, which was you have to admit
there's a problem. First of all, it's not an issue that's just facing Canadian higher education. If you take a look at the United States, Gallup polls have
consistently shown over the last about five years that public confidence in higher education has
declined from about 60% down to 35%. So there's a public issue there. I will say there's good news
in that the higher education is still in the top five and it's better
off than newspapers, television, journalism, and what's at the bottom of the list, which is the US
Congress. So that's the good news. And around 64% of the American public thinks that identity
politics has come to dominate higher education. So that's something we've got to think about.
The Canadian story is a little bit better, but nevertheless, the trend is the same. We've gone from about a net plus of 57 percentage points to a net
plus of 36. So we're still on the plus side, but it's going down. So why is that the case?
From about the late 90s into the early 2000s, maybe into the first years of the Harper government,
universities told a story and you touched on that story.
They told the story that research would generate innovation, would drive productivity, would produce economic growth.
The problem is governments stop believing that story and not just the political people, the
bureaucrats in finance and industry stop believing that story. So that's something that we've got to start, we've got to think about seriously. A couple of other things I'll say
before I turn it over to my colleagues. One is, I think you made a comment that the research
dollars paying the bills. Well, I think it's important that research dollars have never
actually paid the bills. Research dollars have paid the direct costs of the research,
but they've never covered the indirect costs of that research. So in fact, we've been, in a sense, I'll use a term that I wouldn't normally use. We kind of cannibalize
our undergraduate tuition to support our research mission. So you get a double effect there. If
research dollars go down and at the same time, we're unable to generate revenue through other
activities, then the entire research enterprise goes into a bit of a downward spiral. We've got to think about that.
So we have this dilemma.
The thing that pays our bills, which is teaching undergraduates, is not the thing on which
our international reputations rest, which is research.
So that's something that research universities have to worry about.
I'll say one final point about international students.
Australia figured out something about a decade before Canada did, which is that higher education is actually an export good.
Now, the income is generated within our own borders, but nevertheless, bringing international
students into the country is a kind of way of exporting one of our great forms of expertise.
I find it very strange.
The government of Quebec would never
tell Bombardier to stop selling its business
jets to international customers.
And so I find this whole emphasis on cutting
off what is a really important source of export
income for the country very bizarre.
There's a lot that we'll be able to discuss in a
few moments, but for her opening remarks, Maud Cohen.
Thank you first for this wonderful invitation.
When we think about the role of a new universities and how we were built
initially, there has always been two parts of our mission.
The first one is teaching and the second one is research.
parts of our mission. The first one is teaching and the second one is research. And yes, I think at some point there has been a propension to think more about research in our universities
than to think about the teaching part. And in reality, when you think about why our universities
were created, I mean, Polytechnique was the first francophone engineering university.
We were created to give access to French education to population because Quebec needed French
engineers, right? And our universities were built to give access to a better life, better
way of living. I'm not sure we're fulfilling really that role
for precarious communities.
And I'm not sure we're reaching out the way
we may be used to more,
because we are more focused on research than our teaching.
The other thing I'm gonna also mention
is the fact that people get fed news differently now. And I'm not sure where we
should be to feed the news to people and feed the facts more than the opinions. Our medias
are focusing more on opinions because the short-term vision of our governments is what
is guiding right now what the media is. And it's becoming a
loop, a loop of how we're feeding the political position and how we're feeding the media.
And it's a short, very short term view. But that being said, the news is no longer just
on the media side as well. And people get fed all sorts of information.
A fact doesn't really matter.
Scientific fact doesn't really matter the way it used to.
And it gives lacks of credibility as well on our universities.
Graeme Carr, your turn.
Thanks for the invitation to be here.
What to add?
I think universities and Chris is absolutely right. It's
not just in Canada. Universities pretty much throughout the Western world are undergoing a
real stress test right now. And that's a stress test that's happening on many levels and the
stressor is coming from many directions. I think increasingly a lot of us realize that the business model for public higher education
in Canada no longer works, hasn't been working for some time.
To use a line that's increasingly becoming a cliche, we've moved from a model where universities
in Canada were publicly funded to a situation where they're publicly assisted at best.
And I guess the question is whether they're being
publicly assisted in dying at this point. It's a really challenging time. We're also at a moment
where to some degree universities have lost the plot or lost the capacity to tell the narrative
about what their value is in contemporary society. And that partly goes back to something you put your finger on in your opening
remarks, Paul, which is just how the world of communications has changed.
You know, the reality is that universities have been in the knowledge
business and the expertise business.
And we live in an age where disinformation, misinformation and outright lies can get you a
long ways it turns out in the world. So there's a bit of a sense of being out of step with a wide
trend in society and culture, which is not to say that we should be retreating in any way,
shape or form from our commitment to excellence, our commitment to research, our commitment to evidence, but that we need to find a way to communicate that better.
And I guess the last thing that I would say is you mentioned also about parents questioning
the value proposition of higher education. And I think that's one aspect of the narrative that we've lost sight of. Universities always were and they
continue to be important vehicles of social mobility in society. But we sort of stopped
telling that story somehow. I think about my own university Concordia, we had a tagline not so very
long ago, real education for the real world. And over time,
people said, no, that's not the right time. We want to be more of a research university.
We need to get away from that. But the reality is, we have 5,000 students doing co-op stash
last year. That's real education for the real world. And that's what's actually going on in a lot of universities.
And I think we need to find a way to also make clearer that fantastic things happen
on our campuses every day.
Students have fantastic experiences.
Our researchers do incredibly creative things, but we've lost, it seems to me,
the ability to tell that story.
It's interesting that you all keyed in on communications, which I thought was one of
the more esoteric themes that I had mentioned. One thing we keep bumping up against as a society
is that we've lost the commons. There's no place where everyone gets together to get their
information. So a generation ago, being covered in McLean's magazine
or in the Globe and Mail or in the press here in town
would kind of do it for you, but now not so much.
I have to assume that your students' families
are a huge target market for your communications efforts.
Am I guessing right?
Yes and no.
We're targeting the students directly in our case.
And I think you're right.
I think the influence of the parents is more important than maybe it used to be just because
of how parenting happens right now.
I mean, I'm not going to tell a new story, but families used to be 10 children per family.
So the parents were less involved
now. I think, and I'm the mother of a 19 years old, I'm much more involved into, maybe he
doesn't like it, but I'm much more involved than my parents used to be. I'm more informed
as well and I'm more, maybe I have more education so I can help him quite a bit. But our narrative
need to be focused on the parents though because they're the taxpayers right now that are finding
universities useful or not. And I'm going back to the fact that our professors, they
no longer want to teach, they want to do research because that's how they grow within our universities
and they lost the touch with the basis, which is the students and the parents hear about that.
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You mentioned something about a commons, universities of commons. So, you know,
we can think about universities as places where students pick up useful skills or useful knowledge,
a place where research is done that helps improve society. But I think we also have to understand universities as a kind of a
carafoora where people from different walks of life, different parts of the country,
different parts of their regions come together and have those experiences and that they grow
in that sense. And as you said, Paul, you can never actually predict where a research,
a line of research will take you, but you actually
can't predict what someone will do with their university experience. It's completely unpredictable.
I mean, we're sitting in an event sponsored by the Max Bell School of Public Policy,
the Max Bell Foundation. I mean, Max Bell was born in Regina. He came and studied at McGill
at the beginning of the depression. He went back west, was financially successful, came back to Montreal because of a neurological
condition that led him to the Montreal Neurological Institute.
But as a result of all that, he amassed some wealth, became a philanthropist, and that
wealth has been re-injected into Canadian society, into Quebec society to support education,
healthcare. You can't predict that sort of stuff.
So that's one of the things that universities, I think, are really important vehicles for.
I went to Western, I thought I was going to be a doctor.
That lasted three weeks.
And I took two years of undergrad chemistry before washing out into political science.
So the surprise was that I became a journalist.
And the second surprise was that it turned out that
wasn't even failure.
I once told the administration at Western that a good
marketing slogan for a university would be, you
have no idea what you're getting yourself into.
Uh, they didn't agree with me that that was a good
slogan.
Graham, I cut you off.
No, no, it's fine.
I mean, I think,. I think the original question was about appealing to parents and marketing.
I think again, we have to differentiate, right?
So when research universities like ours, somewhere between 15 and 25% of our student population
are graduate students.
So I don't think their parents are the relevant marketing target.
I think most university websites, if you take a quick look at them,
they have one audience in mind, and that's a prospective student, period.
And it's a highly competitive environment.
So that's who you're trying to reach.
Yes, parents are important, but, you know, 18-year-olds are adults.
And they choose programs and they choose universities for a whole variety of reasons
that may bear some relationship
to their parents' hopes and desires,
but hopefully more strongly reflect their own passions
and curiosities.
And it's a circuitous path through university
for an awful lot of people.
So where you end up and what you end up doing
with your university degree is I think, um,
influenced by a lot of other factors besides
what you may or may not have learned in the classroom.
I want to ask all of you for your ideas for the
future of Canadian universities, but I want to
put to you something that I hear frequently from
my readers, which is that if there's a mismatch
between the sector's ambitions and its wallet, then maybe the ambitions are too big. And maybe
we need to right size higher education by making it smaller. I'm sure I'm not the first person to
put that idea to you. What do you make of it? Well, there's a few things. I wouldn't make it
smaller. I would think about it differently, maybe. I was talking about accessibility before,
and I think this is really important. We were built to make higher education accessible,
and we're not really fulfilling this for some of the population. And we need to think about
it. We need to be contributors to the politicians that are thinking about this, to make sure that
it becomes accessible. And I don't have the solution, but we have the solution, I'm sure,
because people that work within our faculties, within our universities, they're supposed
to lead that discussion. They're supposed to be linked with the communities. They're
supposed to be linked with the government about this. So we need to be influencers and I think we're missing the link right now.
We're trying to criticize but we're not really bringing solutions and this is something that
we have a role towards too. I'm going to give you an example and we're not in education so
we're in engineering right, but we have a professor, a young professor,
very dynamic. She's working on filters to avoid microplastic going in waste water of washing
machine. She was working on something in our labs, very reproducible. You can write an article on
this. She can be evaluated on this. But
when she was thinking about it, she was like, how am I going to make sure that this is going
to be feasible in the day-to-day lives of Madame or Monsieur that is changing the filter
to make sure that in the washing machine, it works, right? So she did a project that
was a social project, knowing perfectly that this maybe was going to be
more difficult for her in her CV, in her career. But it's something that we need to think about
as universities. It's not her role to think about how to make this science more accessible
to population and more really concrete to Monsieur Madame Toulmont. It's our role as universities to
make sure that she can evolve in our life. And it's the same thing about accessibility, I think,
of our university to common population. I think we need to be more solution provider than criticizing.
It's easy to criticize. We can hear everybody criticizing every politics right now. It's very difficult to be a politician.
And I think right now what's happening to us is really people are expecting to react more on a quicker basis
and be more close to what they're living on a current day-to-day life.
It's difficult when you think about the future in research, but it's something that we need to reach the gap.
I think we need to think about our future in research, but it's something that we need to reach the gap. I think we need to be more, think about our role differently.
Well, I think all of the data demonstrate that university education is still one of
the most important ways to advance in terms of social mobility. So Graham mentioned the
importance of social mobility. Mo has talked about accessibility. So a university
education is still the quickest way to get up the socioeconomic ladder. And so we have to make sure
that we're fully accessible. And of course, one of the ironies is all of these politicians who
criticize universities, most of them have university degrees, as you pointed out. So something,
you know, they must have gotten something out of it. So we have to try to understand what that was.
I think part of your question, Paul, was about size and growth in universities.
So I think the reality in Canada with the way in which public funding was set up for
higher education was all predicated on the growth model.
It certainly has been in the last few years. As levels of government investment, direct investment in higher education go down,
universities had to compensate for that. And the way to compensate for that was by welcoming more
students. So we've been on a growth model for a long, long time. And the question is,
how sustainable is that? And I think we're
realizing in the current context that it's no longer sustainable. But what also happened
over that same period of time was that the market for education or the market for knowledge changed.
So yes, there's been a proliferation of universities. I think there are 97 or 98 in Canada now. That's
an awful lot. And at the same time, there's been an enormous proliferation of colleges or in Quebec
Sajabs providing an alternative pathway to education, higher education in the post-secondary
world. And now of course, there's a third actor, which are all the private credential
providers, whether it's Google or Amazon, et cetera. So the competitive landscape for universities in
terms of recruitment in the 18 to 24-year-old market doesn't bear any resemblance to what it
looked like 15 or 20 years ago. So is the answer to that to shrink? I don't know,
but I think that's a fair question. But I think it's important in asking that question about size
to understand what the model has been, that the model is now broken and that while the model has
been in the process of breaking, the competitive landscape has also
changed enormously. So the rethink ahead for the business model of the future for higher education
is going to require really radical thinking, I believe.
Graham Carr, at Concordia, you have had to close programs down and close organizations down. What's that like?
Well, we haven't actually closed programs, but I have to say yet,
I realize that's happening elsewhere across the country. We're dealing with a major deficit
challenge as other universities in Canada are, you talk about shrinkage.
So one of the areas where we've been shrinking is in terms of our personnel, not renewing contracts,
closing vacant positions, putting a freeze on hiring, all of which has a negative effect
on people who are left within the organization. It's not great for morale. And it's not great in terms of allowing
you to invest in your future because sometimes you're being forced to make decisions on budgetary
grounds rather than a more complex set of factors that you'd like to use. I think morale is really
under assault in higher education right now. Notwithstanding, as I said,
all the great things that are happening on campuses every day, I think the mood is pretty
grim. It's pretty uncertain about the future. I want to cheer you up by talking about recent
developments in US politics. The Vice President of the United States, who studied at Harvard, has said that universities are the enemy.
The administration has at least announced, we'll see whether these cuts are durable,
but they've announced cuts to the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease
Control, USAID, which was a major market for university graduates since it was founded.
Is that an opportunity for Canadian higher education that Canada can sort of mow their lawn?
Or are you worried that it is going to be contagious?
Look, it's a great opportunity that we're throwing away.
Right?
I mean, we're at the precise moment when we should be opening ourselves to the world.
We should be welcoming the best student minds, the best research minds,
the best teaching minds, and we're kind of letting that all pass by us because we've
got some other things on our side. In fact, the contagion has kind of spread and it's
spread in a way that has prevented us from taking advantage of a great opportunity.
I remember in 2017, there were active efforts to recruit disgruntled American academics,
in some cases successful. Are there similar efforts now?
Well, there might be in the ROC, but it's going to be much more difficult for us to do it since
yesterday's news. I mean, it's already a struggle to recruit talent, recruit good students, because we're
in a competitive environment.
And we have government policies that are really preventing us to be more active.
And not only that, but that are giving us really a bad reputation around the world.
I don't know if you saw Le Monde, which is a French paper that had something requiring students to testify,
students from France that have struggled getting their student permit visa to testify about
this.
So we're probably going to get a few articles in the next few months, a few weeks about
that. And honestly, for us, you know, it's quantic, it's AI, it's semi-conductors,
it's kushmains, it's really highly-scientifical themes. And we're an engineering school,
so whatever fundamental research we're doing is much more at a higher level, I'd say, than fundamental research that might happen in other universities.
So it's a time where we could get talents to come and help us.
But I'm going to go back to accessibility of research and I'm going to talk about AI.
Because yes, we did great things here in Quebec and in Canada and mainly in Montreal, but we
haven't been able to transfer it successfully to the population.
It's the U.S.
that have done that.
And we have invested so much in the fundamental research part of it, but we
have missed the mark on transferring.
And now the cost of doing that is going to be so high that it's going to be a
struggle for us to really remain competitive at that point. And now the cost of doing that is going to be so high that it's going to be a struggle
for us to really remain competitive at that point.
And this is why, I mean, I have a lot of solidarity.
You can ask my two friends, I'm always on their side, but this is where I think we're
not living the same struggles, I think, because we're more on a transferable level and the
government, they like us most of the time, even the conservatives one, because we talk with the industry more, we're more
linked with our engineers, they don't work on top, they work on the floors.
But what I'm saying is we tell a story that talks to the public, that talks to the leaders.
And I think this needs to be more transferable.
And this is why I know that I'm saying things
that sometimes you guys don't agree
because you're more on the fundamental side of it.
But in the next few years to rebuild trust,
this is what's gonna need to happen.
We need to reach out.
We need to be more understandable.
We need to use a language that people can relate to and
they can understand concretely how this is going to help them even if it's in
the more long term. Yeah I think I think Paul part of the challenge around the
we're missing an opportunity for sure to recruit talent. But to me, the question that has to be asked or the argument
that has to be framed is what are we recruiting the talent for? And what's the imagination
of the future, the future economy, the future society that we want to build? And I think
until we can design that narrative and tell that story effectively, it's difficult to persuade people why we should
be bringing in more incredibly talented biochemists or something. To go back to your comments about
Mark Carney and in fairness to Mark Carney, he did mention universities in one of the leadership
debates afterwards. I believe I had nodded off by that point. But there has to be an alignment between
where people imagine society is going in the future and the speed with which things are changing.
To survive in the future, the complex of skills that the next generation will need to have is far more widespread and far deeper than
our generations. So how can we provide those skills? If we want to make the argument about
the importance of talent, it can't just stop with we need talent. We need to be able to explain why
that talent is going to deliver a better future for Canada.
I think we fixed everything.
At least we noticed a lot.
I want to thank the distinguished members of
this panel, Christopher Manfredi, Maud Cohen,
Graham Carr.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience
with everyone tonight.
Thanks to you for coming out and thanks to
McGill for welcoming me as a fellow.
Have a good night.
Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells show.
The Paul Wells show is produced by Antica and
it's produced by the American Theatre Association.
The show is produced by the American Theatre Association.
The show is produced by the Paul Wells Show.
The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max
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